


Wasn't Looking

by TheArtistFormerlyKnownAsG



Category: Captain Marvel (2019), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Abuse of Authority, Attraction, Awkward Boners, Betrayal, Denial of Feelings, Dysfunctional Relationships, Emotions are Complicated, He's not a good person, How Do I Tag, I'm Going to Hell, I'm Sorry, Mentor/Protégé, One-Sided Attraction, Pining, Possessive Behavior, Spoilers for Captain Marvel, The Kree suck, Yon-Rogg's perspective, Yonvers - Freeform, not romantic in the slightest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-11
Updated: 2019-03-11
Packaged: 2019-11-15 15:19:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18075896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheArtistFormerlyKnownAsG/pseuds/TheArtistFormerlyKnownAsG
Summary: “Can’t wait to get your hands on me, can you?”





	Wasn't Looking

**Author's Note:**

> I'm going to hell, this ship is trash, yadda yadda. Wanna join me?
> 
> Edited to add: HellinMilton has translated this trash fire into Russian, which you can find here: https://ficbook.net/readfic/8095001

_She’s so small_ , he thinks as he stands over her, unconscious at his feet, tendrils of lightning still crackling all around her. Terrans usually aren’t a threat he’d take seriously, and so he hadn’t expected her to fight back all that fiercely. Certainly not the way she did, blowing up the energy core.

Minn-Erva walks over, her rifle balanced against her shoulder. “Permission to shoot her, sir?”

He shakes his head. “No. She’s coming with us.” The look Minn-Erva gives him is sceptical, to put it mildly, and he pointedly ignores her.

Later, when they’re back on the ship and Minn-Erva has almost reluctantly checked her for injuries, he considers the possibilities. He doesn’t know what Mar-Vell used to power her new core but it must have been something truly magnificent from the looks of it. He wants to find a way to harness this power, and the Terran woman is his key to helping the Empire win this war.

The Supreme Intelligence is going to be so pleased with him, he thinks.

They’ve just made their first jump on their way back to Hala when she blinks awake. Both him and Minn-Erva are on high alert, expecting her to attack, but she just looks confused and utterly lost.

“Where am I? Who are you people?”

He wouldn’t have reached the position he’s in now if he wasn’t quick on his feet, and he takes her hand in his gently. “We’re your team, Vers. Don’t you remember?”

She blinks, still so confused, but he can see she wants to believe him, wants to have something to hold onto, and he squeezes her hand and gives her an encouraging smile. She answers with a weak smile of her own after a moment, accompanied by a shrug (and a wince, might be injured in ways they can’t see without a med bed). “Guess not. What happened?”

And so he spins a yarn, about a training exercise interrupted by Skrull soldiers, about the coward who attacked her from behind, and she clings to his every word. Clings to his hand all throughout, until, finally, he tells her to get some sleep, she must be _so_ exhausted. He dims the lights for her, conscious of her watching him, until her voice stops him by the door.

“What’s your name?”

He turns and looks at her, how she pulls her knees up against her chest, how pale she looks. _So fragile_ , he thinks, both physically as well as mentally. She’ll need someone to guide her. “Yon-Rogg. You just call me Yon,” he tells her, smiles at the effort visible on her face as she struggles, as she tries to remember. “Let’s get you home, Vers. Everything will make sense then.”

Minn-Erva gives him a hard look when he steps into the cockpit. “What are you doing? She’s a Terran, you can’t be seriously considering taking her with us.”

“What else do you propose we do? Leave her behind?”

“We need to _neutralise_ her, that’s what we should do. She has all this power in her and no idea what to do with it.”

“Exactly my point.” He looks at the calculations, how long it’ll be until they’re home, then turns back to look at her. “She’s a weapon, maybe the most powerful weapon we can ever hope to get our hands on! So if you want to shoot her and explain to the Supremor why you thought that was a good idea, be my guest.”

She doesn’t have an answer to that, and he leaves her standing there to fume silently.

Hala is just as loud and hectic as always, and Vers stays close to him, shadowing him as they make their way out of the hangar. He leads her to sickbay, noting how easily she adapts to the higher gravity, certainly a side effect of absorbing the energy, and hands her over to the medics. For a second, there’s panic in her eyes at being left alone with these strangers, and he squeezes her shoulder reassuringly.

“I need to debrief Minn-Erva and then I’ll be back right away, alright?” She nods, apprehensive, and lets the medic lead her to a bed to be checked for hidden injuries.

His second is waiting for him, the same question still on her face: what the hell is he trying to achieve? He keeps his instructions brief and to the point, and he can see she’s not convinced. He finds he doesn’t care. He needs to convince the Supreme Intelligence and no one else, and all he needs from her is her silence.

He’s just finished changing out of his uniform when the call comes, and he races back to sickbay. Internal bleeding, they tell him when he skids to a stop by her bedside, her face incredibly pale as her body is going into shock. “We need to operate now, if we want her to live. And she needs a blood transfusion,” the medic tells him with a questioning look, and he finds himself agreeing before he has really thought about it.

They wheel her into an operating room and he follows, lets himself get hooked up to a tube as he watches them prep her, and when she reaches for him, her eyes barely able to focus, he takes her hand, just before the anaesthetic begins working and her breathing evens out.

 _This is going to be easy_ , he thinks.

After, he leaves her to recover, instructing the medic to inform him immediately when she wakes up, and then he makes his way to the Supreme Intelligence, his gut tight with anticipation.

The AI, wearing the face of his uncle as always, turns out to be very intrigued by what he tells it, and very pleased with his quick thinking. “A promising individual. You did well, Yon-Rogg.” A pause, and a smile. “I think a promotion may be in order, don’t you agree?”

Back to the sickbay, where she waits for him, dark eyes brightening when he steps into the room. Yes, very easy indeed.

Her recovery is astonishingly quick, not that he is surprised considering the energy flowing through her, energy that bursts out of her at random intervals, setting his hair on end and frying the machines around her. A week after her arrival, when she has moved into her new quarters, rooms he himself outfitted with knick-knacks that give it the appearance of being lived in, she is called in for an audience with the Supreme Intelligence, and she asks him to accompany her.

“I can come with you, but you have to go in alone. It’s private, Vers. No Kree shares what the Supremor tells them.”

She processes this, and nods even though he can see her apprehension, and so he waits for her at the bottom of the stairs. When she comes out again, she hands him something – a control disk. He hasn’t seen one of these in an age. 

“She… It said I need to wear this. To help me control myself.” Her hands light up for a moment, and he feels the electricity crackle across his skin, making his pulse race. It’s surprisingly pleasant.

“Want me to help?”

She looks up at him, a small smirk tilting her lips up. “Can’t wait to get your hands on me, can you?”

It takes him a second to realise that she’s flirting, at least a little, and he makes himself roll his eyes at her. “Eyes to the front, soldier.” Another smirk, this time with a little more cheekiness, and he sweeps her hair to the side, presses the control disk to her skin. She winces, then sighs, and when she reaches up to feel where he placed the disk, their fingers touch, just for a moment.

He walks away, before she can say or do anything else. 

It doesn’t take much effort to integrate her into the team, a team that is as devoted to him as they are to each other, and they go along with the story he has thought up for her, the poor orphan who was made to work in a labour camp before being deemed exceptional enough to enter the military. She was a soldier on C53, and her body remembers even if she doesn’t. She can follow orders (most of the time, anyway) and she holds her own in training. It helps that she has an easy-going personality. Unless the others give her reason not to, she gets along with everyone. Almost everyone, that is.

A few weeks after he put the disk in place, after they’ve gone through a simulated fight at the training center, Minn-Erva catches up to him, leaving Vers to talk with Korath and Att-Lass. He knows what she’s going to say before she opens her mouth. “Don’t you think you’re getting a bit too chummy with her? What is it you’re trying to do?”

“She’s an asset I want to develop. You know that.” He gives her a hard look. “You should know it better than anyone.” It’s a low blow, he knows, but it serves its purpose when her expression becomes flat and closed off, and she leaves without another word.

“What’s got her panties in a bunch?” One of her Terran figures of speech, a few of them bleeding through every now and again, and he only understands half of them.

He sighs and unlatches his belt, giving her a stern look. “Vers...”

She holds up her hands, an innocent look on her face. “Pardon me for asking.” She steps around him and opens her locker. “She just seemed annoyed, is all.”

He watches from the corner of his eye as she peels off the layers of her uniform. She’s just a Terran, vastly inferior to a Kree like him, but he has no problem admitting that she is pleasing to look at. No problem admitting it to himself, at least, he thinks when he looks up and sees Korath watching him, one eyebrow cocked, and he turns away and finishes changing.

And as time goes on, she just… slides into his life. He finds it disconcerting, to say the least, and he doesn’t quite know how to react. When he tells the Supreme Intelligence, it tells him to use it to his advantage, to tie her to him and to the Empire. By all means necessary.

He swallows heavily at the implications of that order.

A year after he has brought her to Hala, he wakes in the middle of the night to find her pounding on his door, her eyes wild and wet, energy crackling nervously all around her despite the disk, and he turns up the suppression rate, watches as her tears spill over.

“I had a strange dream,” she tells him once he has her settled on the little couch in his quarters, with a cup of tea in her hand. A dream about a woman with short grey hair, about fire, with fear coursing through her, and his stomach sinks.

Not a dream, a memory, he knows, and he sits next to her. Their knees are touching, and her breath hiccups. “Probably a memory,” he says. “The camps are frightening places.” And he should know, as he took his own life story and moulded it into hers.

She accepts this, although there is still a line of worry between her brows, and when she leaves, he squeezes her hand.

“It’s the past, Vers. If you forget it, it can’t hurt you.”

Later, when he’s trying to go back to sleep, he remembers her tear-streaked face and thinks how wrong it felt to see her like that. She may just be Terran but if she knew what power she truly possesses… she could crush him. He wouldn’t stand a chance if she really put her mind to it.

He squashes the burst of arousal that thought brings.

The next day, she is her usual snarky self, and things go back to normal. For a while at least.

Minn-Erva is professional, but she makes no secret of her dislike of Vers, and he has to step in one day when, during a training exercise, she almost shoots Vers, missing her by just a hand’s width. “We’re a team, we need to be able to trust each other!”

The Kree woman gives him a rebellious look. “It was an accident.”

“Make sure it doesn’t happen again.” He steps into her space, his tone icy. “I can easily have you replaced, remember?”

And oh, the dislike flares into hatred right before his eyes, and Minn-Erva stalks away, her shoulders tight, her back ram-rod straight.

Vers’ dreams increase in frequency over the next months, and it worries him. In response, he ups her scheduled training sessions, hoping that exhausting her will stop the dreams. It works, for a while, but he also realises that he… almost misses her late-night visits. Misses the reassurance she seeks from him, the way they more often than not end up at the training centre, beating each other black and blue.

Minn-Erva thinks he’s holding Vers back on purpose, when he’s telling her not to use her power, to beat him with her strength and skill alone. His second doesn’t need to say it, he can read it on her face plainly enough.

There’s a truth to it, that’s the problem.

He’s grown… attached to her, something he would laugh at every other commander for. They’re soldiers, all of them replaceable.

Except.

Except he is, and she isn’t.

She is the one the Supreme Intelligence wants. He is just the instrument it uses to bind Vers to the Empire, and it grates on him.

Nevertheless, he knows, deep inside himself, that he would miss her, if she were to disappear from his life. It’s a constant itch at the back of his head, this fear, and it makes him push her ever harder, asking more and more from her. She does it all with a smirk, refusing to let him beat her down.

 _Terrans_ , he thinks. Barely one evolutionary step above the insects they so revile, and yet so like them. Tenacious. It’s simultaneously annoying and oddly charming on her.

When he dreams about her for the first time, he startles himself awake with a groan, to find himself almost painfully hard. He lies staring at his ceiling for a long while as he waits for it to subside, and he wonders how his subconscious – because it _must_ be his subconscious, never his waking mind, that would be impossible – could ever consider her a suitable object of his desire. If it weren’t for the energy coursing through her, she would be so far beneath him, he could just as well mate with a wild animal.

No, he certainly doesn’t desire her.

Maybe it’ll become true if he tells himself this often enough.

Things progress, the weeks turning into months, then years. He can’t remember life without her.

She manages to gain more control of her powers, but never enough for him, never so well that he declares her fit for service, and she resents it. She wants to prove herself to him, wants to gain his approval, his appreciation.

He withholds it, at least outwardly. Instead he taunts her for her inability to beat him without using her power.

Usually all that gets him is a burst of energy to the stomach.

And oh, does he enjoy it.

Until, one day, she looks at him, long and contemplative, before they start sparring, and when she gets into position, he senses something is different. He recognises none of the moves she uses, and when she slides under his arm as he reaches for her, as he aims to use her momentum to turn her away from him, her chest collides with his, and she grins up at him. “Gotcha,” she says, before she presses her lips to his, and then she spins away, swiping his legs out from under him on the way.

He lies on his back for a moment, catching his breath, until she appears in his field of vision, still grinning. “You gonna stay down there,” she asks, and he responds by swinging his legs around, winding them around her hips. She hits the mat next to him with an, “ _Oof_ ,” and then she looks over at him, laughing breathlessly. “Admit it, Yon. I win.”

“Keep telling yourself that,” he says as he gets back up.

His lips still tingle from her kiss (was it a kiss, really?) as he leaves the room, and he tells her to go for a run if she’s in such a good mood. Her laughter follows him down the corridor.

And then, one day a short while later, he is called in to speak to the Supreme Intelligence, and he steps on to the platform, confident that he’s good at his job, that there can’t be anything they would reprimand him for, and they don’t. That’s not why his heart jumps in his chest when he looks at the face the Supreme Intelligence shows him.

He’s irritable, thin-skinned, all day after his audience, and Vers notices because of course she does. He leaves her to draw her own conclusions as for the why of it.

There’s no way he can ever tell her.

He doesn’t have much of a private life, barely anything beyond training and the odd mission, the ones he has to leave her behind for, but every once in a while, he joins “the world of the living”, as Vers calls it, goes out for a drink or to meet old comrades, the lucky few who managed to survive long enough to retire.

It is on one of these outings that he sees her, as he’s walking past a bar, one of those obnoxious places that plays music and lets the patrons sing along, and there she is, her hair pulled back, singing at the top of her lungs. She looks radiant, and he stands there and stares for a long moment, until the song ends and she turns to the couple next to her, as she tumbles into their arms with a grin.

Jealousy flares in his chest, hot and intense, and he makes himself walk away.

He wants to possess her, he realises. In a way, he does already, he knows. He gave her life, he is _inside_ of her, always, but it’s not enough. Fraternisation rules are strict, and he knows he can never have her the way his body wants to unless he wanted to risk his position as commander. But all of this is secondary.

Most of all, he wants to be the face the Supreme Intelligence shows her.

Again, he increases the frequency, the difficulty of her training exercises. She handles everything he throws at her, until finally he has no excuses left, until he has to clear her for active duty.

Everything falls apart then, following the rescue mission that descends into chaos, that he realises too late has been a trap all along. His heart sinks when she doesn’t answer him, the crackling static of the intercom all he hears, and when she finally contacts him and tells him she’s on C53, he almost forgets to breathe for a moment. Of all the gods forsaken planets in the galaxy, it had to be that one.

With every call she makes, he has to watch her doubts grow, can hear the growing distrust in her voice, and it tears at something inside of him. And when, finally, he encounters the Skrull who sims her, when “she” can’t answer whose blood is running through Vers’ veins, he sees red.

 _She is mine_ , he thinks as he blasts the Skrull, and he is momentarily dizzy with the strength of his emotion.

When he sees her on Mar-Vell’s ship, later, wearing that abomination, the mockery she has made of their uniform, surrounded by Terrans and Skrulls, he feels an almost irrational burst of anger and betrayal. Which is ironic, probably, given that he spent the last six years lying to her, but still.

The main lesson he tried to teach her over the years was simple: control your emotions, don’t let them control you. But now, when he grabs her, when she stares up at him with defiance, her anger and hurt plain in her eyes, he slides a hand into her hair, a thumb across her cheek, and it’s only when her mouth twitches with something like disgust that he lets his own anger take over, and he knocks her out.

He watches, uneasy, as the Supreme Intelligence takes her, watches the way her struggle plays out on her face, and he thinks, _Come back to me_.

She doesn’t, and once she has brought him down on the planet’s surface, leaving him to scramble in the dirt while she _flies_ and sends Ronan running with his tail between his legs, he has to finally, _finally_ admit to himself that she has surpassed him, surpassed any shred of control he ever held over her.

Still, when she lands before him, flushed and strong and confident, he considers fighting her for half a second, his gun drawn, but all he sees on her face is… amusement. She knows, knows that he doesn’t stand a chance against her might, and so he does what he always does.

“I’m so proud of you,” he says, before he goads her, dares her to fight him with nothing but her fists, as if that ever worked before. He sees the blast coming, sees the little smile that tilts up one corner of her mouth as she lifts her arm, and when he manages to open his eyes again, when he looks up at her, framed by the sun at her back, he thinks, _There are worse ways to die._

Instead, she drags him across the desert floor and puts him back into the speeder, and he is terrified.

“I can’t go back empty-handed,” he tells her, knows that she knows why, searches her eyes for any shred of sympathy.

There is none, and he understands. Supremor be merciful, he understands.

The glass closes over him, and he looks at her, this small, primitive being who made her way under his skin, who became this goddess right before his eyes.

He knows she can’t hear him through the glass, but he says it anyway, just before she raises her arm and blasts the stuttering speeder off the ground.

“Carol.”

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Eliza Doolittle  
"Wasn't Looking"

Didn't wanna know  
Want to be  
On your own

But when I hit the lights  
You say my name  
Hundred times

Did I make you change your mind?  
And now you wanna make love all night

You wasn't looking for love  
But you never met a girl like me baby  
You wasn't looking for love, for love

Didn't want a heart  
Full of fire  
Burning up

It's something you deny (you deny)  
But here you are (here you are)  
By my side

Did I make you change your mind?  
Now you wanna make love all night

You wasn't looking for love  
But you never met a girl like me baby  
You wasn't looking for love, for love

You wasn't looking for love  
And now you want to wrap your arms around me proudly, proudly  
'Cause you never met a girl like me baby  
You wasn't looking for love, for love

I know you wasn't looking but  
You are putting your love at my fingertips  
So sugar give into it and come and give me a kiss

I know you wasn't looking but  
You are putting your love at my fingertips  
So sugar give into it and come and give me a kiss

I know you wasn't looking but  
You are putting your love at my fingertips  
So sugar give into it and come and give me a kiss

**Author's Note:**

> Title & lyrics: "Wasn't Looking" by Eliza Doolittle


End file.
